St. Thomas Libraries Blog - News, Events and Musings from the UST Libraries

Libraries, News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Political Science, Recently Read, Uncategorized

Where do you get your news?

It seems like, increasingly, we live in bubbles populated by people who agree with us. Our friends post their opinions on our Facebook pages and, if we’ve picked our friends carefully, it turns out we like everything they have to say. Most Americans say that they want to get their news from a source that has no political bias, though our sources for news and information tend to be from those who we’ve grown to trust, and the political slant of any publication is a matter of opinion. My “objective” source might be your “big liberal media.” Curious to know where OSF library users get their political information, we used our “white board conversation” method, and asked OSF Library users about their news diet last week. Our question was “Where do you get your political news?” and about 75 library users posted their answers on Post-it notes on the board. Obviously this is not a scientific survey, but interesting, nonetheless. (For more scientific data on this question, you should look at the Pew Research Center’s recent report on the news landscape. In fact, our results were very similar to what Pew found, especially for the young demographic of our library.)

TRIAL – New World Cinema

Cindy Badilla-Melendez writes:

New World Cinema: Independent Features and Shorts, 1990–Present, an online streaming video collection, delivers approximately 200 fulllength feature films from leading independent distributors such as Kino Lorber, First Run Features, Film Movement, MK2, and the Global Films Initiative, along with approximately fifty award-winning shorts

Trial ends 11/30/12.

October 2, 2012 by

Database Highlights & Trials

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES – DSM-IV

Calling all head shrinkers… the DSM-IV is currently experiencing technical difficulties. There seems to be a major server error on the part of the parent company, Psychiatry Online. You can get to the articles/chapters, but all the links within the articles/chapters do not work. At all. The timeline to get it fixed is around October 9th. Too bad, maybe they could have looked up the server disorder in the DSM-IV. In the meantime, looks like you’ll have to come into the library to use the print book. How very 2002.

October 2, 2012 by

Database Highlights & Trials

Core Curriculum – Social Analysis

You only need to take one class to fulfill the Social Analysis requirement. And as it turns out, the classes below with the asterisk also fulfill the Human Diversity requirement. That’s a pretty good deal. Two birds and all that. The goal of this requirement “is to ensure that all students develop basic abilities to perform social scientific analyses of patterns of social interactions.” The goal of this post is to ensure that all students have quick and easy access to the resources that will help them in class.

ECON 211, 251, 252

GEOG 111*, 113*

POLS 104

CQ Electronic Library – follows what Congress is doing.
Oxford handbook of American political parties and interest groups
Political Handbook of the World Online Edition

PSYC 111

SOCI 100*, 110*

October 1, 2012 by

News & Events

Celebrate Banned Books Week at the UST libraries

Banned Books Week 2012 marks the 30th anniversary of the national book community’s annual celebration of the freedom to read. The event is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and the American Library Association. According to the American Library Association, there were 326 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2011. The 10 most challenged titles of 2011 were:

1. ttyl, ttfn, i8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collings
4. My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hellestad Butler
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
8. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Throughout the week the St. Thomas’ libraries will observe Banned Books Week with displays in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library and the Charles J. Keffer Library on the Minneapols campus, free bookmarks and an informative Banned Books website that includes a survey to vote for readers’ favorite banned or challenged book and a daily online banned book trivia contest.

September 30, 2012 by Andrea Koeppe

News & Events

ERIC Document SNAFU

We are currently experiencing difficulty with access to ERIC Documents (non-journal material in the ERIC database). Note that this problem affects access to Full Text ERIC Documents only (items with the Report icon and the “Full Text from ERIC” links, for example). Items with the Journal Article icon and “Linked Full Text” link are unaffected and should work fine.

This situation may continue for some time. Some alternative methods to locate the items include:

check CLICnet to see if a print version is available,
try a Google search for the title to see if it is online in a different location, or
request the item through interlibrary loan.

For more details click here http://www.eric.ed.gov/pdf_availability.html. Feel free to contact staff at the Keffer Library if you need more information or assistance.

September 28, 2012 by

Database Highlights & Trials

Core Curriculum – Language & Culture

Think globally, folks. Think globally. And when you think globally, it might help if you could think in a language other than English. So if you’re taking a foreign language, we have a great source to help you.

Oxford Language Dictionaries Online – Spanish, Russian, Chinese, French, German and Italian. These translate to and from English, so if you’re stuck on a word, give this a try. But it’s more than just words, it’s got grammar, verb tables, and pronunciation.

We also have whole databases in Spanish (you actually search in Spanish and get results in Spanish, so you better be fluent) and ebooks in French. We got even more resources, so check ’em all out on the Languages databases page. Or see if there’s a course guide.

September 28, 2012 by

News & Events

Student Voting Registration 101

If you haven’t heard yet – guess what? Today is National Voter Registration Day!

We librarians have compiled some useful information about the 2012 election on our Vote 2012 guide – please feel free to check it out! In the meantime, here are some highlights:

Are you registered yet? Click here to register!

For college students, it’s oftentimes confusing to determine where and how to register to vote. But don’t let that stop you! There are a lot of instructions out there, but it all boils down to this: as a student, you have a constitutional right to register and vote in the place you truly consider to be “home” — whether that’s your parents’ house, your apartment, or your dorm room.

Before you make the important decision about where to vote, make sure you know the rules (and sometimes consequences) of registering to vote in that state. Here are the rules and regulations for student voting in Minnesota. You can find information about other states here, or stop by the library TODAY to get registered!

10:00 AM – 2:00 PM & 6:00 – 8:00 PM

@ the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library

———————————————————————————————————————-

Now that you’re registered…

Have you started thinking about whom you’d like to vote for? In Presidential election years, sometimes that can get overwhelming, too, with so many candidates, platforms, and simply the larger number of races going on than in other years.

Luckily for us, there are some great resources out there to help people focus more on the issues than whatever commercial is currently airing. One resource that I particularly like is Minnesota Public Radio’s Select A Candidate feature.

As MPR describes it,

“By answering a series of questions about major issues, you can quickly learn which candidates are most closely aligned with your views. You’ll be able to learn more about each candidate and find out how your results compare with those of others who take the survey.”

Remember to check out our Vote 2012 guide for more information!

————————————

FAQs about Select A Candidate (from MPR’s website):

Q: Does Select A Candidate tell me who to vote for?

A: Absolutely not. Its main purpose is to introduce you to the candidates who are running and their positions on the issues.

Q: How did you come up with these questions?

A: The questions mirror the campaign. There might be issues we are interested in that haven’t come up in the campaign so far, and those aren’t listed here. Should they come up — and we have a mechanism for your interests to be part of the campaign — they will be added to Select A Candidate. The choices from each question mirror positions that candidates have stated. If no answer is close to your position, do not answer the question, for there is no candidate with that position.

Q: How does the scoring work?

A: Each candidate gets 1 point for each question that matches your answer. If you indicate that an issue is very important to you, the candidate gets 3 points. If you indicate that the issue is of no importance to you, the candidate gets 0 points. In this way, the “match” is weighted to reflect those issues on which you decide elections.

September 25, 2012 by

Database Highlights & Trials, Uncategorized

Direct Export to RefWorks from Gale Databases Temporarily Not So Direct

ATTENTION REFWORKS USERS:

If you are running into problems trying to export citations into RefWorks, check to see if you are using a Gale database.

If you are using one of these databases, chances are you seeing one of two things.

Experience #1

In CITATION TOOLS, you choose REFWORKS, hit EXPORT, and see this:

Lucky you! You get the super easy fix! Just click on the hyperlinked RefWorks and you are on your way.

Experience #2

In CITATION TOOLS, you choose REFWORKS and it asks you to download an .RIS file.

-OR-

Go ahead and save this file somewhere on your computer. You are going to need it to finish the process. The next step is to log in to RefWorks. Once there, choose IMPORT found under REFERENCES.

Next, change the DATABASE to RIS FORMAT; then, browse to your saved file under SELECT TEXT FILE; and finally, click IMPORT.

Gale has been made aware of these problems, so hopefully exporting from these databases into RefWorks will soon once again be direct. Until then, these few extra steps should get you where you need to go. If you encounter any other problems, just remember, we are here to help you!

September 24, 2012 by Kari Petryszyn

Database Highlights & Trials

Core Curriculum – Fine Arts

Art history! Music! Theater! Now we’re talking my language, people! This is where I shine </jazz hands>. As a former art librarian, I am happy to tell you we have wonderful art resources here in the library, the greatest of which has to be ARTstor. Simply the greatest collection of digital art images for museums and universities. You can rotate the works, zoom in, crop, save, and/or download images Admittedly, I’m a bit biased towards this project cuz I was involved in AMICO – the forerunner to ARTstor. It has since merged with ARTstor. Hence the love. Also, it’s wicked awesome! Oxford Art provides all of the text to accompany the images in ARTstor. It’s a HUGE encyclopedia (think of Wikipedia just for art) on all things art – from artists, works, movements, periods, techniques, and more. More art resources. Art guides.

We have terrific music resources, my favorites being the streaming audio databases. Literally hundreds of thousands of songs played directly to your computer. So much fun. Look up genres, instruments, song titles, composers, etc. My particular favorite is the Smithsonian Global Sound because I’m more interested in traditional and world music than classical. But hey, that’s not to say the classical and jazz resources are shabby. These are cool, too – just not my bag. But if it’s information about music you need, and not the actual music, then Oxford Music has got it covered. From world to jazz and classical to folk, this is a one-stop shop for background information on all things music. Also, it’s fun to flip through. More music resources. Music guides.

Theater. Ahhh… all the world SHOULD be a stage. In my previous humanities-based core curriculum entries I’ve given Blackwell Reference a big shoutout. Gonna do it again here people! It’s huge for theater. If you’re the type who likes to watch their theater instead of read it (first, bless you. There’s little that compares to the experience of live theater. Secondly, I hope you support local theater), be sure to check out VAST and Films on Demand for wonderful adaptations of your favorite (or required) plays. Maybe you’re a Dr. Who or Harry Potter fan. Well I’m happy to report that we’ve got David Tennant’s turn as Hamlet from the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s production. This is quality stuff! If you need theater criticism or background, Literature Criticism Online and Literature Resource Center have got you covered. More theater resources.

September 24, 2012 by

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